Fedora Weekly News Issue 249

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 249[1] for the week ending October 27, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues[2] on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

Helping out with this elections process is a great opportunity to get started as a free software contributor, especially if you’re unable or prefer not to write code.

We have a handful positions we need help with. We’ve outlined them below. If any of these sound like things you’d like to help us with, please send an email to the Fedora Board (advisory-board AT lists.fedoraproject.org).

Fedora Election Questionnaire Coordinator

The Fedora Election Questionnaire Coordinator will make sure members of the Fedora Community are able to ask questions of the candidates, and will facilitate sending the questions to the candidates and compiling them into a wiki page that will be distributing during the election period.

Specifically, here’s what you’ll need to do as questionnaire coordinator:

REFERENCE: The questionnaire from the last election is here[6] You may want to look at it for ideas.

Send an message out to the Fedora community to collect questions for the candidates, allowing community members to email their questions to you directly or optionally adding them to a wiki page. The message should be sent to the following:

Development discussions related to Fedora Mailing List (devel AT lists.fedoraproject.org)

Planet Fedora (http://planet.fedoraproject.org) – if your blog is not on Planet Fedora, contact Máirín Duffy (duffy AT fedoraproject.org) to post your message to the Planet for you.

On November 1, gather up all the questions that you collected from the Community, and post them all to the wiki page you created[7]. Make sure the page is neat & orderly.

On November 1, send the questionnaire page to all candidates and ask them to send their answers to you by November 8.

For any candidates you haven’t heard from on November 7th, send them a reminder email.

Copy the candidates’ answers into the wiki page and advertise the answers to the same venues listed above (the mailing lists and Planet Fedora.

Helpful Tips:

Consider using your best judgement and selecting 6-8 good questions from the pool for the candidates. 20 questions is probably too much. If some are similar, feel free to merge and restate them.

That’s it. Not too tough, to ask. right?

Fedora Election Town Hall Coordinator

The Fedora Election Town Hall Coordinator will schedule IRC town hall sessions, one for each of the following groups:

Fedora Board

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo)

Fedora Ambassadors’ Steering Committee (FAmSCo)

Specifically, here’s what you’ll need to do as town hall coordinator:

Email all of the Fedora Board candidates between Nov. 1 and Nov. 3 and ask them to provide some 1-hour blocks of time they might be available to participate in an IRC town hall session, between November 13 and November 19th. You may wish to use a tool like whenasgood.net to organize this. Ask them to respond by Nov. 10.

Do the same as above for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) candidates.

Do the same as above for the Fedora Ambassadors’ Steering Committee (FAmSCo) candidates.

Select who the Town Hall moderators were be (see below for that job description).

On November 10, determine the best date and time for each of the three town halls, and advertise this time & date and the irc channel (probably #fedora-meeting and #fedora-meeting-questions on irc.freenode.net) in the following venues:

Development discussions related to Fedora Mailing List (devel AT lists.fedoraproject.org)

Planet Fedora (http://planet.fedoraproject.org) – if your blog is not on Planet Fedora, contact Máirín Duffy (duffy AT fedoraproject.org) to post your message to the Planet for you.

Helpful tips:

When selecting people for town hall coordinators – remember that things like good IRC skills, even-temperedness, knowledge in the area of the town hall they are moderating, are very helpful.

That’s it. Not too tough, right?

Fedora Election Town Hall Moderator (3 needed!)

The Fedora Election Town Hall Moderators will each run a 1-hour long IRC town hall sessions, one for each of the 3 groups being elected. This task requires some skill with IRC. This is an especially good position for someone who does not have a lot of time to devote as it only takes a little over an hour to do.

The date and time of each of these sessions will be published by the Fedora Election Town Hall Coordinator on November 10.

Specifically, here’s what you’ll need to do as town hall moderator:

Show up at least 5 minutes early to the town hall, make sure the IRC channel exists.

Start the meeting using the meeting bot command ‘#startmeeting’

Learn the IRC nicks of the candidates for your town hall. You can look them up on Fedora Community[8] or you can ask via email.

During the town hall, allow only candidates to have voice in #fedora-meeting.

During the town hall, take questions from Fedora Community members in #fedora-meeting-questions, and maintain a question queue. Ask the questions in order in #fedora-meeting, giving each candidate a chance to provide an answer to the question.

Once the session is over, end the meeting with the meeting bot command ‘#endmeeting’

At the end of the meeting, the meeting bot will spit out a bunch of links to the minutes. Take these links and post them to the following venues as soon as possible:

Fedora 15 release name voting information

"The time has come to vote for the release name for Fedora 15. The Fedora community has submitted quite a few suggestions for the Fedora 15 release name, and that list has been narrowed down to the final five candidates. Now you can vote on these names and assist in the final selection for the successor of Fedora 14 "Laughlin".

This vote begins 26 October 2010 and runs until 1 November 2010 at 23:59:59 UTC. Other important facts:

2011 Fedora Scholarship open to applications

"The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes one high school senior per year for contributions to the Fedora Project and free software/content in general. The scholarship is a $2,000 USD reward per year over each of the four years the recipient is in college, which is funded by Red Hat's Community Architecture team, as well as travel and lodging to the nearest FUDCon for each year of the scholarship.

If you are a student who will be entering college in Fall 2011, you are eligible to apply! The application is extremely simple, and is described in length[2]. Please be sure to read the terms and conditions before applying.

The application deadline for this scholarship is February 25, 2011. (Remember -- don't procrastinate just because the deadline is in four months!)

Announcing Fedora Project Blogs!

"I'm happy to announce that Fedora contributors are now able to create their own blog at https://blogs.fedoraproject.org This has been available for a while, but we've never officially announced it until now.

libpoppler soname bump in rawhide

"I plan to rebase poppler in rawhide to poppler-0.15.1. There are some API changes and 1 soname bump of libpoppler.so.8 to libpoppler.so.9. API changes mostly involve addition of new functions (see below). You can test it against your package with this scratch-build[2]. I'll ask release engineers for chain-build at the beginning of the next week.

Regards

Marek

Changes:

cpp/poppler-document.h:

new public functions in class document: get_pdf_id(), load_from_raw_data()

Dict.h:

new public function in class Dict: getXRef()

new private member in class Dict: GBool sorted

Form.h:

new public functions in class FormWidget: getPartialName(), getMappingName(), getFullyQualifiedName()

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Marketing

Jonas Karlsson started a thread[1] asking about the "core" still present on the packaging names as "fc" designation. Paul W. Frields stated[2] that there are technical reasons for keeping, and thus has been renamed as "Fedora Collection". Beth Lynn Eicher followed up[3] by editing the FAQ wiki[4] to include a answer to that question. Rahul Sundaram contributed[5] more details.

Robyn Bergeron announced[6] that she has posted her interview with Justin Forbes regarding EC2 feature profile.

Last week was asked about links to photo albums for using pictures in the One Release note. Neville A. Cross posted[7] that he browsed all the links and made a pre-selection.

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Max Spevack posted [3] about the FAmSCo election nominations [4] The thread [5] has mails from other FAmSCo members discussing about re-election and also posting messages to various Ambassador forums.

Joerg Simon informed [6] that the meeting on 2010-10-25 had no quorum to vote but there was discussion [7] about FUDCon LATAM 2011 [8] and, a request to provide 1200 USD in form of funding for Fedora presence [9] at Comic Con

Test Days

The last Fedora 14 Test Day[1] on 2010-10-14 was on the use of OpenLDAP with the NSS security library - the use of NSS with OpenLDAP is new in Fedora 14, replacing the previous use of OpenSSL. Kamil Paral provided a recap to the list[2]. He noted that "the participation was little low, but it was somehow expected, because this was a non-trivial topic" and that the event discovered three bugs and confirmed the rest of the functionality worked.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 15 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[3].

Fedora 14 Final testing

The QA group put together a great team effort to perform comprehensive and efficient validation testing on the Fedora 14 final release. The Test Compose was announced on 2010-10-13[1], and the installation[2] and desktop[3] test matrices were completed quickly, with results coming in from many different group members. The testing identified several blocker bugs, which were all resolved in time for the release of the Release Candidate on 2010-10-21[4]. Once again, the group came together to perform the installation[5] and desktop[6] validation testing, which was mostly completed by the weekend. No further blocker bugs were discovered (as outlined by Rui He in the RC1 testing recap[7]), and so the QA group was able to join with release engineering and development to sign off on the release of RC1 as Fedora 14 Final at the go/no-go meeting of 2010-10-26[8]. Adam Williamson thanked all of the large number of community members who contributed to the validation testing in a blog post[9].

Reporting bugs from downstream distributions

Edward Kirk reported that the lead developer of Fusion Linux, a distribution based on Fedora, was suggesting users file bugs in Fedora Bugzilla[1]. A discussion ensued on whether it was correct for users of distributions downstream of Fedora to report bugs directly to Fedora's bug tracker. Jóhann Guðmundsson felt strongly that it was not appropriate, and such distributions should have their own bug trackers[2]. Michael Schwendt pointed out that Fedora's abrt does not currently make it easy for downstream distributions to modify it to report crashes to a different bug tracking system[3]. Adam Williamson thought it made sense for bugs in Fedora packages which are present unchanged in Fusion Linux to be reported to Fedora's bug tracker, in the same way Fedora bug reports are often sent upstream to GNOME or KDE[4]. The Fusion Linux developer, Valent Turkovic, said that his plan was for Fusion Linux developers to check reports of bugs and ask the user to file them in Fedora Bugzilla if the package was unchanged from Fedora, RPM Fusion Bugzilla if the package came from there, or with Fusion Linux's developers if the bug related to Fusion Linux-specific customizations.

Release criteria

Adam Williamson proposed a new release criterion[1] requiring the final release notes from the Documentation team be present in packaged form in the release repository (at Final release stage). Jesse Keating suggested similar criteria for artwork, spin-kickstarts and fedora-release packages[2]. Adam provided revised drafts for all three proposed criteria[3].

Testing new versions of anaconda

Mike Cloaked provided a very useful guide to creating a custom USB key to test new releases of anaconda when images containing that version of anaconda are not available[1]. Brian Lane said it was good to see someone else using his work, and pointed out that the script Mike used should also be able to produce a full, updated DVD ISO, but would take longer to do so.

Fedora QA retrospective

James Laska announced the QA retrospective page for Fedora 14[1]. The retrospective attempts to identify things that went well and things that went badly during the release cycle, to help the group improve with future releases. He appealed for contributions to the retrospective from anyone who could identify good or bad elements of the QA work for the Fedora 14 release.

Translation

Fedora 14 Tasks

John Poelstra informed[1] in the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 14. As per the schedule, review and correction of the Final Translated Guides (i.e. daily build htmls), Website content and 0-day Release Notes is currently underway.

Publican 2.3 Released

Ruediger Landmann announced the release of Publican v2.3[1]. A number of bugs related to localization have been fixed in this version. Also, Release Notes have been made available for the first time with a Publican release. The updated packages of the new version are available on koji.

Design

Icon Work

As a new contributor to the Design Team, Bryan Nielsen completed his first task[1] with guidance from Jakub Steiner "Thanks for all the assistance in putting this together, there were some gaps in my Inkscape and SVG knowledge and skills that have now been filled." After growing in experience he grew confidence to continue "I'm looking forward to taking on another ticket once this one is put to bed" and started working[2] on another icon "I quickly threw together a couple of hires mock ups that reuse existing components", again with Jakub's guidance[3] "Here's a few tips. Starting with a highres always leads to suboptimal metaphors. Think how you'd execute that at 16x16px."

Logo Work

Felipe Echeverria, new contributor to the Design Team, tackled[1] as his first task the logo/icon design for the blogging client Lekhonee, a ticket[2] open for a long time. He works with guidance[3] from Máirín Duffy "maybe rotate the pen on the right 90 degrees clockwise, so the two pen nibs make an 'L' for Lekhonee. But as they are now they make a great 'W' which makes me think of Wordpress so this may be entirely unnecessary" and advancing in subsequent iterations[4]

Mockup Work

Luya Tshimbalanga posted[1] his mockups for an Anaconda redesign "I started to work on initial Fedora installer mockup[1]. The concept is based on openSUSE first screen installer (GRUB) and uses design team default typeface", Máirín Duffy explained[2] is a bit early for this task before an usability study "I think it's fine to work through visual design ideas right now, but we
haven't really begun a usability assessment of Anaconda so I also think it's a bit too early to start mocking up the UI screen-by-screen" and proposed[3] the Fedora 15 development cycle for this "Yep definitely, once F14 is out the door I definitely want to start working with the Anaconda team and post stuff here on-list as well as on
the wiki."